On 6/19/2007 12:21 PM, Gus Wirth wrote:
Some people may have poor phone line connections or be distant from the
the central office, which for DSL has the same effect. It reduces the
Signal/Noise Ratio (SNR) which forces a reduction in transmission speed
to achieve the same Bit Error Rate (BER). I happen to have a good phone
line connection and live close enough to the central office that I get
full speed (1.5Mbps) all the time.
Unfortunately, I don't know of any way to test a line beforehand to see
how it will work. Well, actually I do but the phone company wouldn't let
me do it :) I guess a primitive test would be to see if a 56k dial-up
modem will give you full speed. If it can't, then I doubt DSL will either.
I switched from cable modem to dslextreme.com about 6 months ago and
have been pretty happy. They had some promotion for the 5Mb/s service
with 8 static IPs. We're ~15K feet from the CO. At first the speed was
terrible. I complained and AT&T came out the same day. They pinged the
line, then removed several dead-end taps (left over from the days of
party lines). Speed is now consistently 525kB/s down and 85kB/s up.
The connection drops for a few seconds, perhaps 15 times per day, and a
few 30-second dropouts per day. Not long enough to drop an ssh
connection but long enough to be aggravating. About once per month it
drops altogether and I have to cycle power on the modem to get it back.
One thing I haven't done yet is to have them set up reverse DNS for any
of the IPs. They said it's $25 per change, which sounds a bit steep.
Karl
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